The smell of butchered hunting beast meat was heavy, thick with iron and an acrid, musky warmth that clung to the roof of the mouth.
Inside the hearth cave, the birch-wood fire crackled with a steady, dry roar. The heat had melted the ice along the cave walls. It sent trickles of clear water down the stone gutters Pei Jing had chiseled into the floor. Outside, beyond the slate barricade, the wind shrieked through the crags. It carried the first heavy flurries of an approaching mountain blizzard.
Pei Jing rolled his sleeves to the elbows, securing them with rawhide cords.
On the flat granite workbench before him lay the nine-foot carcass of the Two-Tailed Shadow Panther. Cheng Shan had already completed the first flaying, his curved skinning knife peeling the glossy black pelt from the fat under the skin with the practiced speed of a border scout.
The pelt lay stretched across two cedar poles near the cave entrance, drying in the warm smoke. It was a masterpiece of living defense. Dense, oily fur that shed water like polished horn, underlain by a leather stratum twice as thick as prime steer hide. There was only a single two-inch puncture behind the jaw where Pei Jing’s skinning dagger had cut the medulla. That left the prime dorsal fur fully flawless.
